Jan 27, 2016 – Troubleshooting and Brainstorming

At our Jan 27 meeting, we had about 30 people in attendance including an important visitor from the IEEE Foundation, which is providing the grant for our work this year. We were pleased to welcome Karen Galuchie, the Executive Director of the IEEE Foundation, who joined to observe the meeting. The participants rotated through three activities. The first activity involved setting up KEN and troubleshooting issues. The second activity was a discussion on the mechanical design of the neck mechanism and brainstorming on how to improve it. The third activity focused on how KEN interacts with people and designing approaches to improve the interaction.

During the troubleshooting activity, the team was asked to set up KEN without any guidance from the experts. Then, we tried to observe what went wrong and figure out how to correct it. Here’s a picture of some notes we captured on the tabletop whiteboard documenting some of the steps.

The steps to get KEN running are not usually this complicated, but in this case, the network cables were plugged in incorrectly (remember, the team was doing this without instructions), which caused the network to fail to start, which cascaded failures to other components. Most of the effort was to shut the systems down cleanly, and restart them after the network cable issue was corrected.